Do a Google search on this individual, Dr. Ralf Kneuper, CMMi Consultant . He has done some rather good work on how CMMi and ITIL work together. I did a presentation to my fellow IT Managers/Directors and we focused on how these two methodoligies can work together. As an FYI, CMMi is much further along than ITIL in our organization and one of our concerns was confusing the organization with similiar terms.

Will be happy to send you a slide with a graphic showing how they relate. it is what I was able to understand based on Dr. Ralf Kneuper's work.

Wallop, if it is not too late, would you send me a copy of the slide as well as I am in the position of having to decide whether to use either ITIL, CMMI or both. Thanks. My email is barbara.embry@convergnet.com

Barbara, I'd be interested to see how your investigation develops. Some of the early replies in this chain reflect my own experience in that CMMI and ITIL are different things and are difficult to compare. And it's not like comparing apples and pears, more like apples and umbrellas.

From what I understand, CMMI has a software engineering background and is therefore more easily aligned to a 'development' environment as opposed to ITIL, which is focussed on the operational/service/customer experience aspects of IT (and indeed non-IT if you wish).

Also, CMMI tends to be more prescriptive, whereas ITIL is a framework that an organisation can choose to adopt/adapt/ignore as befits its needs.

There will be some touch points between the two methodologies and, if you decide to embrace both, it will be important to identify those so that primacy and interfaces can be determined. I would suggest that any clashes in process and/or toolsets would only serve to undermine one or both of them.

This is based on the Software CMM, but definitely covers the same 'landscape' as the ITIL. (And all through these ITIL-CMM discussions I have assumed people are talking about the ITSCMM, even if they have used the CMMI acronym - it's a benefit of the doubt thing )

actually maybe I shouldn't have assumed. Anyone above, (or other readers), if you really are looking to map CMMI to ITIL and don't know about ITSCMM or haven't looked at it, do so. It'll save you a big smelly pile of work.